C. Werner - Blighted Empire

Nothing would keep him from that achievement. Nothing.

The necromancer mounted the short flight of steps, holding a thin hand towards Marko as he passed the peasant. Marko hesitated for an instant, then with an uneasy expression, placed within Lothar’s grasp the ancient bronze knife. Clutching the arthame in his bony hands, the baron approached the altar.

The sacrifice looked up at him, eyes wide with desperate entreaty. Perhaps, once, Lothar would have been weak enough to submit to that appeal, to allow the petty affiliations of family to stay his hand. But that time was long gone. There was only one thing he wanted from his mother now. One swift strike sent the arthame plunging into her breast. Lothar could feel her agony flow up the dagger. Savagely, he twisted the blade. He was already a patricide, after all. Why should he hesitate now?

It was the work of a few minutes before Lothar rose from the gore-splattered altar and lifted his prize to the grinning skull. The empty sockets seemed to stare down into the shivering heart, watching as the last drops of blood oozed from its veins.

The necromancer could feel the power gathering about him. When he closed his eyes, his vision was ablaze with the glow of aethyric vibrations. His skin crackled as magic pulsed around his body. Lothar’s mind churned with weird images and phantom landscapes, ghostly voices hissed in his ears. It was an effort to subdue the force coursing through him, an effort only a spirit as focused and determined as his own could achieve.

When he closed his eyes, he could send his spirit hurtling down the long eternities, riding the deathly emanations through the ageless cycles of dissolution and decay. He could see the rise of kingdoms, the ebb and flow of empires. He saw the great necropolis of the desert, watched as megalithic pyramids rose from the sand of aeons, heard the intonations of priests more than half dead themselves as they made obeisance to the mummies of kings. He was there as the Black Pyramid reared up into the sky, a colossus spun from midnight and redolent with emanations of foulest sorcery and obscenity. He was witness to the Great Ritual, the apocalypse that heralded the eternal night and blotted out a mighty people in a single breath.

He smelt the rot of thousands, watched as a simulacrum of life crept back into withered flesh and ancient bone. In his vision, he saw the dead heaped in the streets, piled in palace and temple. He saw them stir, saw them stumble up onto fleshless feet, saw them stagger towards the pyramids and necropoli. An entire race, annihilated and resurrected in a single night. A people slaughtered and restored by a single dominating will and the magic discovered by that great and terrible intelligence.

The same magic that was the source of the necromancer’s art.

As Lothar stirred from his dark epiphany, he was aware of fresh vibrations, new stirrings of the death energy in the temple. Shouts and the clash of swords pierced the chorus of ghosts in his ears. Turning from the altar, he saw the doors of the temple had been flung open. A mob of ragged peasants and a mixture of armoured men in the livery of the watch had forced their way into the building and were fighting with Marko’s thugs in an effort to reach the sanctuary.

The necromancer inhaled the invigorating smell of spilled blood, then extended his hand. Flush with the power of his matricidal sacrifice, Lothar von Diehl fixed his mind upon a single purpose. Dropping his mother’s heart to the floor, he withdrew De Arcanis Kadon from beneath his robes. Almost with a volition of its own, the book fell open at the spell he intended to evoke.

‘We must flee, your lordship,’ Marko was pleading. ‘The mob will show no mercy, even to one of your rank!’

Lothar looked down at the little rogue. Marko had been very useful to him in the past, but that usefulness was at an end. Turning his gaze again to the aisle, he watched as the thugs were dragged down one by one, butchered beneath the avenging hands of the mob. Marko was right, they would do the same to him for what he had done here. That is, if they were given the chance.

Raising his voice in a cry that was almost reptilian in its slithering tone, Lothar intoned the dread names of ancient Nehekhara, drawing upon those primordial powers the liche-priests of Khemri had bound behind those names. The infernal energies that had been gathered about him were now loosed, transformed and harnessed into a conjuration far beyond what even Kadon might have achieved. The skull set atop the shoulders of Shallya’s decapitated statue burst apart in fragments as the necromantic energies were channelled through it, leaving only the bloody symbol suspended in the air. The levitating symbol was ablaze with a fell light, like some charnel star. Eldritch rays shot forth from the hieroglyph, streaking through the temple with snaky, sinuous motions.

The mob at the doors fell silent as the atmosphere within the temple became frigid and dark magic streamed down from the altar. The surviving thugs cried out in abject horror as they saw those bolts of sorcery seep into the dead plague victims strewn about the pews. Where before there had been only dead clay, now there came a stirring, a hideous awakening. Emaciated hands clutched at the benches, smashed heads rose from pools of gore.

Screams filled the temple as both invaders and defenders watched the dead lurch into ghastly life. Dressed in foul rags, their bodies shrivelled from malnutrition, their skin blotched with the black sores of the plague, the zombies shambled out into the aisles. Upon the pillars, the bound corpses of the priestesses flopped and flailed, trying to slip their ropes to assault the living flesh so near at hand.

The obscene intonation of Lothar’s spell intensified, the rays of pallid light emanating from the altar burst into a fresh frenzy, speeding through the temple, burning paths through walls and ceiling. The mob at the doors was in full flight now, Marko’s thugs fleeing alongside them. The wounded were abandoned, left to shriek as the zombies converged upon them with clawed hands and clacking jaws. Deep within the sanctuary, Marko attacked one of the stained-glass windows in a frantic effort to escape. He had just brought a heavy chair smashing through a glazed panel when the first zombie reached him, bearing him down with its dead weight. The rogue flailed and struggled as the thing tore at him with its teeth. Before he could free himself, a dozen other zombies were crouched over him, pawing at him with dead fingers, relenting only when the man was reduced to a shapeless pile of meat.

Lothar was oblivious to his erstwhile accomplice’s fate, focused entirely upon the mighty magic he had unleashed. All across Mordheim, tendrils of sorcery were snaking through the streets, seeking out the morbid harmonies of grave and tomb. Into the mausoleums of the Steinhardts and the crypts of the nobility and the unmarked plots of the destitute, the rays seeped. Coffins burst, sepulchres groaned open, marble doors gaped wide. From cemetery and plague pit, the dead of Mordheim were called forth, shuffling out into the streets on rotten feet and skeletal claws.

Not a living soul was abroad when Lothar von Diehl marched out from the defiled temple. The only things moving on the streets of the great city were undead — the cadaverous legion his sorcery had brought from their graves. He felt triumph swell inside him as he watched fleshless skeletons and decayed zombies troop past the steps of the temple. Centuries of Mordheim’s dead, all enslaved to the will of one man!

He could feel the living inhabitants of the city cowering behind locked doors and peering out from closed shutters. Their terror was an almost palpable thing. It would be so easy to crush them, to kill them all. A single thought and he could turn his undead loose against them and make himself master of Mordheim!